Where NFL History Is Made
This is a dek.
Wilson has been sewing NFL footballs by hand since 1955 in Ada, Ohio. The factory recently underwent a $15 million expansion.
Every throw a quarterback makes on an NFL field starts in Ada, Ohio. Every year, a Wilson Sporting Goods Co. factory in the town, about an hour south of Toledo, creates more than a half-million footballs and sends 27,000 of them to the league, whose players toss nothing else at practice and on game days.
Most other mass-market Wilson goods—volleyballs, pickleball paddles, tennis rackets—are produced abroad in manufacturing hubs such as Vietnam and China. But the NFL requires its game balls to be made in the US. Wilson has been fulfilling that mandate since 1955 at the Ada facility, which recently underwent a $15 million expansion. The company signed a new deal to extend its rights to make NFL footballs this year, and also produces balls for college and high school programs. The constant whir of sewing machines diffuses through the 80,000-square-foot space, which in June replaced a smaller facility next door.
In the 1800s, football players used balls made from inflated pig bladders acquired from meatpackers, hence the “pigskin” moniker. By the turn of the 20th century, the development of a vulcanized rubber liner allowed manufacturers to create a more durable football with a more precise shape. Wilson’s predecessor, the Ashland Manufacturing Co., specialized in turning animal by-products into tennis rackets, golf balls, baseball shoes and other items. In 1914 the company reorganized into Wilson Sporting Goods and started making footballs in the 1950s with the acquisition of the Ohio-Kentucky Leather Co. Wilson is now owned by publicly traded Finnish sports equipment maker Amer Sports.
Not all footballs come out perfect. Inside the factory, a chart on the wall shows the top defect of the month: In July it was stamp alignment, ahead of errors like skipped stitches and imperfectly shaped tips. The company stands by its handmade construction process just the same, and there aren’t any robots at the Ada facility. Years ago, Wilson brought in digital scanners to detect flaws on the leather sheets. But they found that approach was slower and not as accurate as the human eye. “We’ve looked at mass-producing,” Murphy says. “But you can’t do it with this product.”
